Mission Time & Forcing Time?

[MarkShot]

How did they ever come up with the idea in Harpoon of setting mission time based on the local system clock? As far as I know, this is the only game that works like this.

Is there some form of hack other than changing your PC's clock to control what time a scenario starts? Does anyone know of a utility for XP that launches a process with a scaled system clock? We used to use things like that on mini-computers for testing financial/trading systems.

Thanks.

[MarkShot]

Well, I found one way to do this, but certainly not worth the trouble.

If you run Microsoft's Virtual PC, you can set VPC's clock to be whatever you want. Then, if you run Harpoon under VPC, you can control the exact time at which the scenario executes. A bit too convoluted for my tastes.

[JudgeDredd]

ARe you saying because it's set to the local system clock, I load up a scenario and it starts at 8 in the morning (the time locally to me) and you load up the same one at the same time, it starts at 14:00 hours?

I genuinely am being thick here when I ask...why does it matter? I could see how it would matter for PBEM, but there isn't any.

[MarkShot]

Yes, that is exactly how the scenario time is set (covered in the manual).

It matters for day and night cycles.

Such cycles affect visibility, contacts, ID, targetting, and possible sonar performance since the sun heats the water and makes it more turbulent; also possibly layer depths.

[JudgeDredd]

Point taken.